Press Release

Locks Gallery is pleased to present The Studio Inside Out, an exhibition of new paintings by Jennifer Bartlett, on view May 18th through June 30th, 2011. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, June 3rd, from 5:30 to 7:30pm.

Bartlett will exhibit large-scale diptych paintings that are inspired by her environment - her first year working in a new studio and garden in Brooklyn designed by the artist. Bartlett’s working environment has consistently influenced her artwork and has also served as an extension of her artistic practice.

Starting in the late 1960s, Bartlett lived and worked in SoHo where, informed by the movement towards conceptual art and the city’s industrial streetscape, she developed her signature steel-plate painting technique. During this period, she titled a series of these paintings after the addresses of her and fellow artists’ studios as an acknowledgement of her artistic community. In the 1980s Bartlett’s West Village home, a converted industrial space, became a multi-story lab for her large-scale commissions and paintings that evolved to include sculptural objects. Bartlett described her conceptual interest in the home in 1978: “The house is also just a given image that I work with. It is like a throwaway, and its construction is very abstract... My interest is in how it can be done rather than what the image is.”

During a year spent in Nice, France (1979-80) Bartlett produced nearly 200 drawings in a monumental series titled, In the Garden. Since the 1990s Bartlett has spent summers working in Amagansett, NY, where she paints the coastal landscape. The California-bred artist may never be psychologically far from the left coast; as Robert Hughes wrote, her paintings “speak of a need for location in the world - in light, wind, water, all the shimmering epidermis of experience.”

Jennifer Bartlett (b. Long Beach, CA, 1941) received her B.A. from Mills College, CA, and her B.F.A. (1964) and M.F.A. (1965) from Yale University, CT. Her works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, TX; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and The Tate Gallery, London, England, among others.

Bartlett has been the subject of one person exhibitions at institutions including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Tate Gallery, London, England; Baltimore Art Museum, MD; and The Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT.